XP loads with no desktop

Windows loads both in Safe and regular mode but I get no desktop or icons. Using ctrl alt del I get the user interface and I try to run it manually but it tells me that it cannot be found. If I browse to it I find it. But it still tell me that it cannot find explorer.exe. Any thoughts or suggestions would be great. Tom

When you say you browse to explorer.exe.. Where are you browsing to it at? And then what do you do? Double-click the file to run it? This is when you get the "file not found" error? Please be more specific. This is possibly a malware infection and judging on your above response I will probably send you over to the malware removal forum, so be prepared.

Thanks for your reply. It was a malware infection. I finally found one that would run and got rid of it.